The Paper Palace

The setting and the hunt for family secrets will start you speed reading for answers. The layers of gratuitous sex and familial abuse skidded me to a halt, and I found it painful to continue. A historic family infidelity was flippantly regurgitated and it left me sickened. The big secret will make you ask yourself if you could have done the same thing. I questioned myself here, because this setup for revenge by inaction supplied me with a satisfaction for the timely appearance of a well deserved karma in spite of the tragic result. The ending threw a lot of people off, but I felt like I knew what happened. Be sure to heed the warnings that if you are an assault or abuse victim this is not recommended for you. Even if you are not you show more will be uncomfortable and consider not finishing, hence my 3 not 4 rating. show less

Did I understand, when I finished this popular novel, why I was #260 on my library's waitlist for it? Yes. The setting, on Cape Cod, and the author's obvious love and devotion to its little hidden ponds and woods and abandoned Pilgrim graveyards, is a major character, beautifully rendered. The coming of age of narrator Elle and her sister Anna and their friends and many step-brothers, step-sisters, and step-parents, is painful and a bit confusing due to the ever-expanding cast. Parents and grandparents divorce and remarry at an alarming rate. For two sides of a coin, there's a blunt sexual joy between adults that's refreshing and a chilling, horrendous instance of rape and abuse. So, all in all, it's a memorable story with Elle show more ultimately torn between her husband and her childhood friend. She's lucky that she is adored by two wonderful men, but unlucky as well.

Quote: “My mother doesn’t take on airs, she has them naturally.” show less

I bought this book because it had so many great reviews. I bought it because it had a "Reese's Book Club" sticker on it. I bought it because it had a "Heather's Pick" sticker on it. I bought it because the blurb made it sound like it was going to be a sexy, dramatic, summer-set love story. In other words - I now have trust issues.

There was no great love story here on either side of the triangle. I feel no reason to root for any of them.
There's nothing sexy, just gross. The way things are described is gross. That's not even taking into consideration the very disturbing things that happen in this story, which were not at all advertised.
The setting could have felt nice, but unfortunately was too boring to appreciate. The descriptions of show more things were so overly long. The plot stalled constantly because we had to hear how every single thing looked, smelled, felt like, what it reminded someone of, a time they had been near a thing like this before... ugh. Vacillated between being bored and put off the entire time.
This book is also like 70% flashback, which is insane considering what is happening in the present is infinitely more interesting. (Not to mention a lot of the flashbacks are completely pointless.)
The pretention was unbearable. The misogyny was the icing on the cake. Our main character, and it seems like the author, are definitely "not like other girls."
I hated all the characters. They weren't bad people in a complex, interesting way, but in an annoying, unbearable way. It would be really sad that the main character went through all the things that she did, except she couldn't just have a bad life, she had to have the worst life ever, where every single person she meets is terrible, bad thing happens to her again and again, and the people in her life still treat her poorly, and she just adores them for it. I don't think we're supposed to hate, say for example, her husband, but I do. Also, nobody talks the way the characters in this book do. Especially not children.
I also just did not like or understand how this story was formatted. Most chapters had a flashback section and a present day section, until all the sudden we'd have 20 pages of different flashbacks in a row before coming back to the present. It's also divided by four separate "books", which just felt unnecessary.

If I had to give this book any compliments, I could say that I like the lengths of the chapters - not too long, not too short; I thought the cover was beautiful (not the one with the boat); and no matter how hard it was for me to continue reading it, I had to, because I was at least intrigued enough to need to find out how it ended.
These aren't really good enough reasons to recommend a book though, so, I don't. show less

Do you remember your first love? The person you thought you were meant to be with for all time? What broke you up? Do you ever second guess the life you've gone on to lead without them, the relationship you've built, the family you've created? Would you reconnect with this person? More importantly, would you cheat on your spouse with this person? This is just a small sampling of the questions swirling through Miranda Cowley Heller's novel The Paper Palace. The bigger question, perhaps, is what drives main character Elle, in so many of her decisions, and what is right and what is wrong on a grander scale.

Elle, Peter, and their three children are at the Back Woods, the family camp compound that has been a part of Elle's life forever. show more She's spent a lifetime of summers at this seemingly idyllic retreat. It holds the memory of her first love, her deep love of her sister, and many wonderful times, but it also holds the memory of the neglect and abuse she endured as she grew up. Opening the morning after a transgression she's spent a lifetime working towards, the novel moves back and forth between specific times in Elle's current day and her unspooling past. It is also broken into five sections: Elle, Jonas, Peter, This Summer, and Today, but all of the sections are narrated in the first person by Elle and the novel as a whole is centered on Elle's interiority, how she is torn between the love of her childhood friend, Jonas, and her husband and father of her children, Peter. She has a long and complicated history with Jonas and he knows the darkest parts of her but she has built a good life and wonderful family with Peter.

The writing here is quite beautiful, visual, and sensory, and it evokes the Back Woods wonderfully. It makes sense that Elle would face her personal conundrum in the place she is both the most comfortable and uncomfortable. The long tale of her past, including the trauma, rape, and sexual abuse she endured, are inextricably woven together with her friendship and eventual love of Jonas but their actual connection isn't fleshed out enough to make the years delayed infidelity understandable. To be fair, none of the characters were engaging enough that the reader cares about their interactions with each other, making Elle's question of whether to stay with her husband or to leave him for Jonas less gripping than it might have otherwise been. The novel tackles a lot through the lens of marriage and divorce but it also addresses some pretty taboo subjects (incest, rape, ongoing sexual abuse, neglect) and the ways that these traumas impact someone for their entire life. All of this is believable but somehow, it was still hard to connect with the novel as a whole. The end is ambiguous in a way that you can argue either outcome, which really mirrors the entirety of the novel and as such is probably quite appropriate. This is a very polarizing novel and it is does get rather graphic so while readers might want to read it to decide for themselves, know that some scenes will really disturb some people. show less

Literary fiction - meaning it is complex and not necessarily an entertaining read...but thought-provoking and intelligent, and dark. The title refers to the generational family 'camp' on the Cape, built from Homasote, pressed paperboard in the 1930s. It is also indicative of the flimsy, deteriorating family within. Plagued by sexual abuse and unstable marriages, the Bishop family has learned to live on the surface, with the facade that all is well. Elle Bishop has just challenged that by cheating on her husband, Peter, with her long time family friend from the Cape, Jonas. The present day narrative takes place within 2 days, but the interior memory that Elle lives in that time frame spans her childhood in the 70s and 80s in NYC (with show more summers on the Cape) to now. It is a sordid story of her nuclear family, Mom, Dad and her older sister Anna disrupted by divorce. Both parents remarry a couple times with varying degrees of success, but the girls like none of their step-parents and the feeling is mutual. Most integral to the story is her mother, Wallace's third marriage to Leo, a musician with a son Conrad, near to Elle's age, and a daughter, Rosemary, who stays with her own mother. The dynamic is a troubling one, and becomes a turning point in Elle's life. What saves her is Jonas, a 'kid' at the time they meet, four years younger than she is, but devoted and smart and funny and a Conrad hater. They essentially grow up together through some key formative years, experiencing a tragedy that will bind them further. Essentially the narrative of the past is a way to justify the narrative of the present. The writing both drew me in, but allowed me to stay objective to watch this train wreck of a family try to right itself for the next generation. The Paper Palace might need to crumble for that to happen, but by the end, there is hope. A blurb from Adrienne Brodeur: "Set in the physical and psychic landscape of Cape Cod...[it] is a fever dream of a novel, luminous with love and shot through with humor and heartbreak. It is a book that explores the indelibility of childhood, what it means to be shaped by place, and all that is unpredictable about the human heart." show less

“High above the tallest dune, a star appears in the sky, faint at first, then gaining strength until it becomes a brilliant jewel. And yet I know it is death I am seeing. The flickering out. The silent gasp. The sputtering beauty. A desperate flame—massive, transcendent—fighting for its last breath” (294).

This is a story about characters that are like dazzling, dying stars—beautiful and tragic and impossible not to watch their bright deaths streak across an obsidian sky. This is a story about star-crossed lovers. Like Catherine and Heathcliff, Elle and Jonas’s souls are made of the same: hummingbird feathers and underwater kisses and pine-needle-carpeted forest floors. With a shared history—filled with innocence and show more connection and shame and guilt and secrets—they are woven together, different ends from the same skein, threaded and knotted together despite difficult life choices that keep them apart.

Told in four parts, in dual timelines—past and today—Eleanor’s story unravels from multicolored yarn, each thread revealing how she gets to be a fifty-year-old happily married woman with three children who must deal with outcomes of a one-night affair she’s just had with Jonas, the love of her life. Through the untangling of her story, we watch pieces come together, secrets and revelations buried deep beneath the sand dunes of the Cape and the sewers of the city asphalt, things too dirty and tainted and rotted, tugged out from the shadows and unmasked enough for Elle to make a final impossible choice: “One [she] can’t have. One [she doesn’t] deserve to have” (355).

Page-turner isn’t the right term. This story is more than that. This is a story you get caught in, wrapped up tightly in—sometimes it feels like a warm blanket, others like the eye of a storm. Regardless, it’s a story so immersive, so emotive that these characters will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page. show less

When I finished this book, I felt as if I needed to talk to a therapist. It gave me all the feels and whatever I say in my review will be inadequate. The novel is told from the point of view of Eleanor/Elle and it switches back and forth from the present to various haunting memories from her past. Elle and her family return every summer to their cabin in Cape Cod. This place is almost a character itself, because it is described so vividly and it has really shaped each of their lives in one way or another.
As this complex and layered novel progresses, secrets from the past are uncovered. It is gritty, raw, and honest. It can be a little dark, but it also includes a little humor. It is dysfunctional family at its best. It explores how the show more smallest decisions can have the biggest effects on one’s life. It is powerful and lyrical and it will evoke so many emotions that when you get to the end of the book you will feel as if you have been through a trauma yourself. show less